


chandeliers and cathedral ceilings

by arbitrarily



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Casual Acquaintances with Benefits, F/F, Jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:22:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22200079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Proximity is almost as good as possession. Well, almost.
Relationships: Willa Ferreyra/Tabitha
Comments: 7
Kudos: 39
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	chandeliers and cathedral ceilings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GlassesOfJustice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassesOfJustice/gifts).



She knew Tabitha, sort of, from before. Tabitha is the kind of person worth knowing if you want yourself to be known, so of course Willa made an effort. An effort that didn’t look like an effort, which only required that much more work. But Willa’s willing; she’ll work hard to make people know her.

“I just think it’s very important that people like me.” Willa told Connor that one night. It was after that whole failed ayahuasca journey of self-discovery he held on his back patio at Austerlitz, next to the fire pit and that chimera of a pizza oven. She was still nauseous when she said it, her face clean and bare, seated beside him in bed in one of his undershirts he had never worn.

Connor placed a hand on her thigh and she wanted to slap it away. She felt the urge to dry heave, blamed the lingering effects of the ayahuasca for it. “I could not agree more,” he said. It was the only thing, other than her financial well-being, they ever agreed on.

This family, the Roys—they always have something to celebrate. They celebrate the way most people would mount an offense. Like each toast is a fucking call to arms. She lifts her champagne flute in more obedience than enthusiasm. 

They're in Logan’s apartment and no one is paying attention to her. She hates and loves it here by equal measure. She’s never felt less like she belonged somewhere and never wanted to belong more. 

After dinner, while Roman and Shiv gang up on Connor, Willa slips out. It's like this she finds herself out on the terrace, alone with Tabitha. The city is there, spread out from them and dark and glittering. New York isn’t that big of a city when you get down to it, and when you narrow it to the people that matter, it’s an even smaller, shallower pool to swim in. And Willa has spent a very long time teaching herself to swim.

“Hey, sorry, I didn’t know anyone else was—I can go—”

Tabitha snorts. “It’s not a private party. By all means. Have a seat.”

Willa does what she says. It’s cold up here, but Tabitha appears unfazed. She doesn’t even have her coat. Her shoulders are bare and very sharp and so is her jaw, and Willa thinks these are important details to know about someone. Tucked along the side of the building against the wind, they are close enough their knees could touch. She bets those are sharp, too. 

“How’s Mr. Kennedy?”

Willa’s face drops into a frown. She hates feeling like she’s on the outside of any joke. “What? Who?”

“Your man. He’s got his eye on the Oval Office? Per Rome, which y’know. Bring your own plentiful grain of salt.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. He has, uh, ideas. I guess.”

Tabitha lifts an eyebrow, like a woman in an old movie who’s plotting murder or insurance fraud or simply to make another person’s life miserable. It’s wildly compelling. 

“Who doesn’t?” Tabitha says. 

She watches as Tabitha raises a Juul to her mouth. She inhales. Exhales. Somehow when Tabitha does it, it’s not douchey at all but instead classy and elegant. Tabitha, Willa is sure, is the sort of woman who can make anything classy and elegant—including, she assumes, sucking Tom off and feeding him back his come (yeah, she heard that story; who hasn’t.) Though, maybe not. There have to be limits.

Without any further prelude, Tabitha launches into a string of gossip, most of which is unintelligible to Willa, all first names and nicknames, people she either doesn’t know or doesn’t know by these names. There doesn’t seem to be a single person who matters in this city that Tabitha not only doesn’t know but about whom she doesn’t have a heaping shovel of dirt to spill. 

She’s not sure why, but Willa starts to giggle. Tabitha stops mid-sentence—something about someone named Fritz and an au pair situation involving twins and she thinks Wells Fargo, but maybe that’s a real person and not a bank in this context—and she fixes her eyes on Willa. Willa only laughs harder, unrestrained and genuine. Tabitha smirks before her own mouth stretches into a grin. 

The truth is, Willa had missed Grace for a little while there. It wasn’t due to anything about Grace as a person, but Willa had liked having someone else in the margins with her, on the fringes of the Roys. Never fully granted entrance. Grace might’ve looked down her nose at her, as if because Connor explicitly paid for Willa’s company that somehow made her less than Grace, paid in kind by Roman through his time and their shared apartment and all the nice things she bought herself when they really came from him. Tabitha is a better replacement. Tabitha doesn’t care. And god, Willa wishes she could be that way, too.

She first spoke to Tabitha at Shiv’s wedding. Connor circled the room, trying to drum up political support for a campaign that didn’t even exist yet. Tabitha lounged not on the sofa but along the arm of it, every single thing about her arranged as if she belonged specifically there. Will suspected that anywhere Tabitha went she was able to assign it a similar sensibility—that she belonged in each and every room she entered.

So Willa went over to her.

“Hey, hi,” she said. She extended her hand. She watched the way her presence filtered over Tabitha’s face, which was to say, nothing changed in her expression at all. She shifted her flute of champagne to her other hand and took Willa’s. “I’m Willa.”

“Right. Tabitha.” She was bored. She had already bored her.

“Yeah, I know.” The pause between them was awkward, like they were in a high school cafeteria and Willa had a lot of nerve and not many friends. She was still loosely holding Tabitha’s hand like maybe she was supposed to kiss it. “I’m with Connor.”

Tabitha sat up that much straighter, a feat that seemed both technically and abdominally impossible considering her current reclined position, but Tabitha managed. Interested, that was how she looked. “You’re Connor’s girl.” The way she said it she made it sound like that was her sole profession. Willa finally dropped her hand. 

“I’m a playwright, too. I’m writing a play.”

“Aw, that’s so cute.” Tabitha finished off her champagne with a quick sip. “So, you wanna get out of here?” And, yes. Willa very much so did.

Willa’s not dumb. Willa’s read Patricia Highsmith, thank you very much, or at least she saw the movie version of that one with Matt Damon and Jude Law, so she knows how bad a situation like this can end, if you let it. But then, let’s say, in her wildest fantasies she does murder Tabitha on a boat in Italy, and then, like, tries to replace her, tries to be her—would that mean she’d have to start fucking Roman instead of Connor?

“He doesn’t fuck me.” Tabitha told her that one evening. It was the night Connor had rented out that hotel suite to announce his candidacy and vision for America or what the fuck ever. She sat with Tabitha in the stairwell, an open bottle of champagne set between them and better coke than she had ever had the luxury of snorting singing in her bloodstream. “He doesn’t even touch me.”

Willa had her shoes kicked off and she stretched her leg forward. Her bare toes bumped against the very smooth and very warm skin of Tabitha’s leg, just below the knee. “That’s a goddamn tragedy,” she said. “A waste.” She was very drunk and very high and extremely much happier than she had predicted tonight’s events would allow her to feel.

Tabitha reached down. Her fingers loosely linked around Willa’s ankle. It made Willa’s breath stick and flutter in her chest, made something squirm deep in her. Tabitha gripped her that much tighter, her fingers long and thin and strong, and Willa made a funny gasping hiccup sound as she imagined them inside her.

“For him more so than me,” Tabitha said, all teeth.

“No one liked my play.” The Roys are doing damage control. The yacht seems as far away as her own Broadway dreams and Connor’s presidential ambitions. 

“I didn't see it,” Tabitha says, a small shrug that is maybe meant to be an apology but most like not. Tabitha and Willa have been left to their own devices: the family and Gerri and an army of lawyers who all look and move like pallbearers are crowded noisily in the next room. They’re sequestered like children or the help.

Willa frowns. “Yeah, you did. Roman brought you.”

“Oh. Well.” The shrug this time is definitely not an apology. “I didn’t see it.”

It’s moments like these when Willa wants nothing more than to dig her fingers into that thick head of hair and pull. Yank until that long throat bends and bares itself, until, maybe, Tabitha would make a sound—authentic and earned and not so well-rehearsed. 

“You’re not very nice,” Willa says instead. Her fingers curl at her side, tight against her thigh, a fist. She really would like to murder her in a boat.

Tabitha lifts her head. Her mouth is pursed in a small and amused smile. “Well, no. But then I’ve never particularly pretended otherwise.”

Willa can feel the downward pull of her mouth and she knows that she’s pouting. She can’t bring herself to care. She slumps that much lower on the couch.

“Why do you get to do whatever you want?” she asks. 

Tabitha cocks her head, only a little confused. “Baby, you do too.”

That’s not true, not even close, but among all the things Willa knows Tabitha is, she is definitely not the kind of person who will accept dissent. People like her never do. 

“I can do whatever I want?”

Tabitha nods, something dark lighting up her eyes.

Willa rolls off the arm of the couch and presses the front of her body against the side of Tabitha’s. Tabitha is lean and hard and ungiving. “Anything?” she says, low and obvious. Tabitha doesn’t move. When nothing really matters to you, it’s easy to play with every single person around you. Willa should remember that; she should write a character like that. She won’t. She’d rather be that person than create it in fiction. She wants to be that person. She leans forward and presses her mouth to Tabitha’s. Tabitha’s lips part immediately, like she was waiting for this. Like Willa isn’t doing whatever she wants but rather what Tabitha wants. 

She kisses her that much meaner, with bite. She can taste her lipstick, chemically waxy, and the inside of Tabitha’s mouth is dry, but Willa’s tongue is wet. 

Tabitha kisses her back, the corners of her mouth tipped up, the cat who finally has the canary, and it’s with that same self-assurance she slips her hand between Willa’s legs. Effortless. Of fucking course. The scent of Tabitha’s perfume is expensive and light and Willa covets it, she nuzzles into Tabitha’s neck. She can’t decide if she’s letting Tabitha kiss her, touch her, because she wants her or because she wants to be her. If the difference matters. 

She bats Tabitha’s hand away from her before she can truly touch her—her fingertips against the skin of her upper thigh, more anticipation than any man in recent memory has been able to inspire in her. Instead, she presses that much harder against Tabitha’s side, her hipbone scythe-like sharp against Willa’s lower abdomen. She reaches her own hand. Tabitha is bare under her dress, not even an overpriced bit of lace to hide her cunt. Willa doesn’t hesitate: she spreads her with two fingers and then rocks the heel of her palm against her clit. She waits for Tabitha to react. For her to be able to do something, anything, to affect her. That’s power, right? That’s all power is, despite any and everything this family seems to think it is. You don’t need the presidency and you don’t need a media empire and you don’t need to fight over the corner office. All you need to do is find someone with a little more sway than yourself—and then you make them beg. 

Tabitha’s mouth parts and her hips twitch forward, as if involuntary. The angle is off, but Willa slips two fingers into her. She curls them, makes Tabitha move again. She’s wet, wet enough she can hear it, each glide of her fingers into her frictionless and easy. A noisy huff of air leaves Tabitha’s mouth that sounds nearly like the start of a laugh. Willa works her harder. Willa wants to slick and slide her entire hand into her, wants to curl it into a fist, she wants to be inside of Tabitha, wants to _be_ Tabitha. She sucks in a harsh breath. Tabitha grins. Willa keeps reaching.


End file.
